


Delirium Soup

by thebluejay



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Memoirs, Soviet Union
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-04-13
Updated: 2019-05-24
Packaged: 2019-10-22 16:20:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17665949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebluejay/pseuds/thebluejay
Summary: This is a translation from Russian of a family friend's thinly-fictionalized memoir, or rather, of its first chapter. He published it in Russia in 2004; I made this translation as a gift to him in 2012, and posted it on livejournal at the time. I'm crossposting it to Ao3 now, in February of 2019, mostly for the purposes of tidy archives.This book gets at the nature of life in the Soviet Union, at the ways it was fundamentally alien to those living in the US today, better than any other of its kind. If you read Russian,the whole thing is up on the author's website.I am, sadly, unlikely to ever translate more of it.





	1. The First Computer

_ "Where are you from?" asked the girl. _

_ "New Jersey," I said. _

_ "No," said the girl, "I mean... I like your accent.” _

_ "A-a," I said, "I'm from Russia.” _

_ "Oh, I know, that's, like, somewhere next to Germany, right?” _

_ "Yes, very close. We even fought a war against them.” _

_ "You fought too?” _

_ "No, this was a long time ago. My father," I said, "he was a war hero.” _

_ "Were a lot of your side killed?” _

_ "Twenty million.” _

_ "You're kidding.” _

_ "No. Have you been to Russia?” _

_ "No," said the girl. "My sister went. Last summer.” _

_ "Did she like it?” _

_ "Yeah, she loved it.” _

_ "And what did she like?" I asked. _

_ "I don't remember. She went to some big city.” _

_ "Moscow?” _

_ "Yeah, probably. But she said she wouldn't go there again. I want to go though. Do you think I should?” _

_ "Yes, of course. You will like it too.” _

_ "Are you serious?" asked the girl. _

_ "Absolutely," I said. _

 

* * *

 

 

The First Computer

_ Moscow, July 26, 1985 _

 

I know that these days, most people don’t like to reminisce about old times. I don't much like it myself. But sometimes, I make exceptions. Now, for instance, I’m going to tell you a story from ancient times.

 

It all happened in eighty five, in Moscow, in the summertime. No sooner had I come in to work than the phone on my desk started ringing. It was my boss.

"Hello, Ilya,” he said.

“Good morning, Boris Borisych.”

“It’s not that good a morning,” said my boss. “We have a committee coming to check out the ministry system. Chetaev just called. I’ll be waiting for you in fifteen minutes.”

 

Chetaev was our Institute Director at that point, and  _ their  _ chairman as well.  That’s how they always had it - whoever was the director was also the chairman. Or the other way round - the chairman was the director. I don’t even remember anymore. 

Before Chetaev we had a different director. He was great deal milder. If they came up with some idea up at the top, he would, of course, inform us, no matter how nonsensical it was. But he didn’t much care whether we did it or not. 

Chetaev was completely different. One of our crowd from the institute used to complain that once a week, at the very least, he would have this one dream. That he’d be sitting at home, having breakfast, and then Chetaev would yell, right into his ear, “What is your economic effect?” And my acquaintance would wake up in a cold sweat. And he just couldn’t get rid of these dreams.

 

No one even remembers anymore what in the world their “economic effect” even was. And when I tell people, no one believes me. Because then it turns out that the whole country was working in the wrong direction, so to speak.

I’ll give you a small example. Say you made some machine and sold it to a factory. And the factory used your machine to make a thousand rubles worth of chairs. If you sold your machine for eight hundred rubles, then the economic effect would be two hundred rubles. But if you sold it for a thousand, then you’d have no economic effect at all. So the more you sell it for, the worse it is for you. No one could explain why it worked that way. No one even thought about it. And Chetaev, without thinking too hard about any of this, was very strict about all of it, and his people thought of him very highly for that.

 

I still had ten minutes. I sat down in an armchair, stretched my legs out comfortably, and closed my eyes.

 

_ We went downstairs and asked the young lady where it would be safe to go for a walk. And she gave us a map, on which she drew a little rectangle in pencil, and said that as long as we didn’t leave the French Quarter, everything would be quite safe. _

_ “And if we do leave?” I asked. _

_ “It’ll probably be all right as well,” the young lady said, “but I don’t advise you to do that.” _

_ “How do we get to the center?” _

_ “You’ll turn left here and keep going straight, without turning. In five minutes, you’ll be in the center.” _

 

_ We left the hotel, turned left, and started to wander towards the center. There were a lot of people in the streets. And the further we went, the harder it was to get through the crowd. Every forty or fifty meters we’d see some small musical group, and all of it was like some jazz festival. _

_ “Ilyusha!” said a voice right next to us, and I turned around. _

_ I saw a girl and a young man. They were waving at us cheerfully, and it all looked as if we had agreed to meet up with them here. Moreover, it seemed as though we knew them well, because when we came up to them, we started calling them Mira and Lesha, and the girl, Mira, just grabbed me by the sleeve and started to drag me somewhere. _

_ “You should like this,” she said. _

_ “What’s ‘this’?” I asked. _

_ “You’ll see in a moment.” _

_ “How would you know what I could like?” _

_ “I know,” said Mira, “I told you, I know. You’ll really like this.” _

_ While Mira was dragging me, she kept talking, nonstop. _

_ “We’ll go to the Oyster House,” she said. _

_ “Do oysters live there or something?” I asked. _

_ “No, oysters get eaten there. But we won’t go there right away, not now.” _

_ “So where are we going now?” _

_ “You’ll see it all yourself.” _

 

_ We were moving forward through a thick crowd of young people, among whom there was a great many young girls. And suddenly I saw one of them abruptly pull up her shirt, baring herself. Everyone screamed approvingly, and the girl pulled down her shirt, and started looking up to the second floor balcony, where there was a bunch of young guys.One of them tossed something down to this girl. And when she caught it and put it on, I saw that it was a bead necklace. The crowd hummed approvingly again, and that same second, another girl, who was standing right next to me, turned towards me and also pulled up her shirt above her head, baring her completely white breasts. And these breasts, which were amazingly fine, were, since she was standing with her arms raised, even though they were quite large, sticking right out into my face, and this, of course, made my breath catch. _

 

I opened my eyes and looked at my watch in fright. Ten minutes had passed since I had sat down in the chair and apparently fell asleep right away. And I was surprised what complete nonsense a person can dream of, just like that, with no warning. Everything, absolutely everything that I had seen in my dream was strange and implausible. And the other thing that had surprised me was that while I was dreaming, it hadn’t seemed like nonsense at all. And I thought that the next time I’d have a dream about something like that, I should try to realize that all of it was a dream, and wake up.

 

And now, I really needed to switch over to thinking about the ministry system. We knew about it in our institute, as in the ministry itself, only as the most vague of ideas. Like, incidentally, most of what we worked on. Even though we were supposed to be working on the most important of government plans. These plans were developed in their State Committee by simple bureaucrats, who, naturally, couldn’t begin to imagine what the country needed to work on in the next five years. So they didn’t even trouble themselves to try and understand what in the world they were planning. They just sent out a bunch of gibberish, and the folks on the spot would each decipher it individually. Later, people would defend unimaginable dissertations, many would become Academics, would get all kinds of awards.

 

I remembered how once, an acquaintance of mine called me up. At one point, we were in college together. And then he went off to work for that State Committee. 

“Listen,” he said, “we’re still short. Instead of eighty programs we only have sixty-five. If you want, give me your suggestions.”

“I don’t even know what to suggest anymore,” I said. “The institute already tried to squeeze something out of me.”

“Didn’t you used to work on Egyptian squares or something?”

“Latin rectangles.”

“Right. I think that will work. Let me put in your topic right away. Go ahead, dictate the title.”

I told him my topic.

“Great,” said my acquaintance. “Except we’re supposed to have automated systems right now. So let’s start this way: ‘Automated system: ’ and then continue as written. You don’t mind?”

“No,” I said. “What are they?”

“I’ll send it all to you later. Right now, let’s decide what funding you need.”

“I don’t need much. Five will probably be enough.”

“Keep in mind that this is for five years.”

“Five years? Then put down twenty five.”

“Alright, I’m putting down twenty five million for five years.”

“Million?” I asked. “I meant twenty five thousand.”

“Are you crazy? We don’t have any programs for less than five million.”

“Really? Put down five million then.”

“Great, then,” said my acquaintance, “five million for five years it is.You can go ahead and send us the expanded program.”

 

The institute approved my program immediately. It turned out that they had been struggling for half a year, not knowing what to submit. In a year, the program came back to the institute from the committee for realization. Out of the five million, we only spent a few thousand on salaries over the five years. I went on a business trip once. That was two hundred more. And I got two pens, a ruble apiece. And the rest of the money just got crossed out somewhere. 

We finished work on the program in time and in five years, sent a report to the committee. And there it was kept on file for ten years. That was it.

 

I went off to my boss, and on the way got to wondering how it was possible that all these pointless things seemed to everyone to be absolutely natural, normal, and ordinary. And then I thought that all of this was very like some terrible dream. And it occurred to me that maybe I was actually sleeping at that very moment. I was even surprised that this had never occurred to me before. If it was very like a dream, why had I never before suspected that I was asleep? And I started wondering how I could check if I was sleeping or not, and how I could possibly wake up. And all this made me quite uncomfortable. And then I finally realized that I should have been thinking about something completely different. What I should’ve been thinking about was how we were going to get out of the situation with the ministry system. Because we hadn’t even started working on it yet.

 

It all started when our minister found out that the prime minister had a computer on his desk. Naturally, our minister wanted the same computer his boss had. But the computer his boss had on his desk was an “Electronica-85”. At that point, we didn’t have anything better than the “Electronica”. It didn’t cost much. But getting it was a nightmare. The premier might have gotten it, but our minister just couldn’t manage it. Even though some other minister, the one that made the “Electronicas”, swore by everything holy to get him six of them in July of eighty five. 

 

I bet you don’t even know why we needed six computers. All of us, on the other hand, knew perfectly well that for the Electronica-85 to work, you need five more of them for spare parts.

 

Anyway. This was in February of eighty five, when our minister was promised six computers by July. He immediately issued a directive to get everything done properly in a week’s time. By March first. The directive didn’t get sent to Chetaev until April. Chetaev, of course, knew perfectly that everything to do with computing should be sent on to our laboratory. But by the time he figured out that that was what computers were, June had come to an end. When Boris Borisych saw the directive, it was July.

What could you possibly do? Go to them and say, how come you sent out a directive with a March deadline in April, and then forgot about the computers too? No, people usually didn’t do that. I proposed that we send the ministry a plan for the development of the system over the next ten years or so. They could have easily confirmed it by accident. But Boris Borisych found a different solution. As soon as he saw that the deadline had passed a long time ago, he reported that the system was finished, explaining to the minister that we would need two more months after the computers were delivered. And I came up with the reason that we would need those two months: to insulate the computers with wire, so no one from the American embassy would be able to spy anything out. I had suggested it as a joke, it’s true, but Boris Borisych immediately approved it all. And that was the way our explanation was accepted up there.

 

The minister, having received the report that the system was ready, and having forgotten that we didn’t have any computers yet, reported to the premier that everything was completely fine. And the premier reported straight to their most important body, which they, for some reason, called the Political Bureau. And they decided to come and see how we had it all working. 

 

I came into my boss’s office.

“Where’s Mitya?” he asked me.

“At home, I suppose,” I said, “sleeping after a night shift at the vegetable depot.”

“Call him immediately. No, wait. Listen carefully. The minister called. He said that in fifty minutes he will bring HIM here.”

“Who’s ‘HE’?” I asked.

Here Boris Borisych gave me such a look that I understood everything immediately - what could one possibly discuss with me, if I didn’t even understand the simplest things.

“Listen,” he said, “can you do anything?”

“But, Boris Borisych, don’t you know that we don’t have the ‘Electronica’, and who knows if we’ll ever have it?”

“Do you have … that one?” asked Boris Borisych, wrinkling his forehead.

“What ‘that one’?”

“You know, that one...”

“The ‘Iskra’, you mean?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“What does the ‘Iskra’ have to do with it?” I asked.

Here he gave me that look again, and I immediately understood what he would have liked to say: “How can one work with people like this? Not only can they not think of anything themselves, but even when you have explained everything to them they can’t grasp it.”

 

Well, at that point I told him right away, sure, I understand, Boris Borisych. But what did I understand? The “Iskra” was, in theory, a personal computer. Even though you couldn’t lift it off the ground, that’s how heavy it was. And maybe also because it was bolted down dead tight. And our “Iskra” was missing some lamps or something, too. Because where they made these lamps, they only made eight of them instead of three hundred thousand. Although their minister promised our minister to make a ninth one, specially for us, in excess of the plan. But of course he immediately forgot about this.

 

I called Mitya. It was a good thing he hadn’t gone to bed yet. “Come right away,” I said, “you won’t believe what’s happening.”

Mitya arrived. I had by this point drawn a label saying “Electronica-85” and stuck it on the “Iskra”. And we decided to type up some tables, the more the better. Say, this factory completed one hundred fifty percent of its production plan, and that one only ninety nine percent.

 

Though I must say that releasing information like this, that a plan had only been ninety nine percent completed, that was something only the most complete dimwit would do. Usually everyone put down more. How much they put down depended on how much had been done in reality, and on how secure the director’s position was, and on lots of other things. Say, if the plan had been forty seven percent completed and the director had no influence anywhere at all, he would need to put down, modestly, one hundred one and two tenths percent. But if the director was a solid one, he could easily, even with seventeen percent, put down one hundred thirty four and seven tenths percent. And he’d be even more solid after that.

 

So Mitya and I decided to make it seem like there was information flowing to us, right at that moment, from all the factories in the country. But then, as luck would have it, the “Iskra” stopped working completely, and we were only able to type up one single chart, and of all that the “Iskra” had, the only things working were the on-off button and the monitor brightness regulation handle. 

 

By that point, the black cars had arrived. We looked, and there was our minister, helpfully explaining something to some guy. The guy was very old, of course, but nothing out of the ordinary. It was only the neck, maybe, that gave him away. It was very sturdy. Like all of them had. And the number on his car had three zeros at the beginning.

 

For those that don’t remember anything anymore or never knew it, I’ll say that there was a fair amount of cars around with one zero, and they had all kinds of bosses riding in them. Two zeros meant members of government, and folks called them member-rides. And three zeros I only saw that once.

 

So these three-zero guys came up to us, and we began explaining how our system worked. 

“This,” I said, “is the report of the Ural Mining and Metallurgical Integrated Works. The plan for the extraction of black shale is one hundred twenty percent complete.”

“That is,” Mitya said, “twenty percent in excess.”

Here I twisted the brightness handle there and back. The picture disappeared and then came right back.

“And this,” I said again, “is the report of the Ural Mining and Metallurgical Integrated Works. The plan for the extraction of black shale is one hundred twenty percent complete.”

“That is,” Mitya said, “twenty percent in excess.”

Here I twisted the handle again and elbowed Mitya in the side. 

“And this is the report of the Ural Mining and Metallurgical Integrated Works,” said Mitya. “The plan for the extraction of black shale is one hundred twenty percent complete.”

“That is,” I said, “twenty percent in excess.”

We looked at them. Looked like everything was fine.

Snatching, surviving, shiftiness - those they were always good at. Memory and intelligence, though - those were a little worse.

“So where does this computer usually belong?” asked the old guy. 

Here our minister shone: 

“In my office,” he said.

“And how does the the information from the factories get there?” asked the old guy. 

“Over the wires,” said the minister, without batting an eyelash.

 

The old guy was terribly happy. Then they went to Chetaev’s office. And in a couple hours, Boris Borisych called Mitya and I to his office and said the old guy was delighted and gave a review of the system as a unique phenomenon. And that he said that this was the first computer in the country in service to the people, and requested that the creators of the system be thanked and informed of his admiration. And the old guy also said that the system had no analogue, not only in the country, but also, it seemed, abroad, and he told Chetaev to nominate it for the State Prize on the spot. 

 

“Wait, Ilya,” said Boris Borisych, “Aren’t you going on vacation today?”

“Yes,” I said, “I have a train in an hour and a half.”

And then all my thoughts started going in a completely different direction. I remembered I had all of the train tickets, that I myself would not be going on the train, because I needed to drive the car down. And, as usual, I would be driving it at night. I remembered how Kirill asked me:

“So you won’t be late this time? Do you remember how you let us down last time?”

“Almost let you down,” I clarified. 

“Almost let us down,” agreed Kirill.

 

Last time, I got to the train as it was departing. And I ran after it with bulging eyes. The guys noticed me and rushed into the corridor. And I could already see someone jostling the conductor away from the doors. In one hand, I had three empty flasks, and in the other only one, but half-full of honey. And I tried to throw them into the open door of the train on the run. And the one that had honey, by some miracle, fell down, under the train. And I yelled something. And everyone yelled. And some passenger, not one of us, being frightened, pulled the emergency brake.

 

I also remembered that I still needed drop by home to get my stuff. And that, even though there was still about a month until the move, it was clear even now that there was no way we would get more than four people for it. And I remembered lots of other things like that. And I heard Boris Borisych ask:

“Where are you going, anyway?”

“The countryside,” I said, “the bee-farm.”

“To rest, then? That’s good. Go, rest.”

“I’ll run off, then?” I said.

“Run, run,” said Boris Borisych.

 

And I ran off to rest.


	2. Excerpt from Chapter 22. Sergey.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [The narrator is now living in the US. He’s on vacation in Paris with his wife Marina and their friends Sergey and Sveta. Sveta has a French friend that’s eating dinner with them.]

...

“The Kay-Gee-Bee was a powerful organization,” said the Frenchman.

“You mean it had a lot of bullets?” I asked.

“No, I mean everyone was under its control. It knew everything about everyone.”

“Who told you that?” I asked.

“Is that not the truth?”

“Where did you get that idea?” asked Sergey.

“Everyone I met in Russia said so.”

“It was a popular misconception,” Sergey said. “My uncle once told me the following story. In the seventies, his cousin moved to America. My uncle worked on some terribly secret project. And he had a friend that worked with him, who also had a cousin that moved to America at about the same time. When they were hired, both my uncle and his friend were forced to sign a paper saying they have never had any contact with any foreigners, and have no relatives abroad, and that if this status changed, they would need to immediately notify the local Kay-Gee-Bee. So when their cousins left, they sat down together to decide what they should do. My uncle’s friend said they should immediately go and tell them everything. He knew that after that, they would get fired, but he told my uncle something like this: “They know everything about everyone. Nothing we tell them will be new to them. And the fact that we told them will mean that we are trustworthy, so we might not get fired.”

“And you uncle went to give himself up?” I asked.

“No, he didn’t give himself up. He told his friend not to go anywhere either. He said, “Look at how we all work. Look how nonsensical this all is. Why do you think they’re any better than us? The people that work there are the worst, not the best.””

“And his friend listened to him?”

“No, his friend didn’t listen, he went to them and told them everything.”

“And he was shot on the spot,” I said.

“No, he was not shot. They told him they had already known about his cousin, but still thanked him for telling them about it, and told him to go back to his desk and keep working. He was very glad that it turned out so well. But when he came to work the next morning, he saw…”

“That he was shot,” said Sveta.

“No,” said Sergey, “he saw five guards at the entrance instead of the usual two. The additional three pulled my uncle’s friend over to the side and told him he no longer worked there and to clear out of there.”

“And no one ever uncovered your uncle?” I asked.

“No. My uncle worked there for almost another ten years and honorably retired.”

“A very instructive story,” I said.

“This story has an even more instructive ending,” said Sergey. “In the beginning of the 90s, my uncle wanted to visit America for a month. He had dreamed of it all his life, though he had known that it was impossible. He filled out the forms, made an application with all the right documents, and pretty quickly got a refusal. Because it was considered that he knew too many secrets.”

“So what’s instructive about that?” I asked.

“The instructive part is that his old friend at about the same time also applied for an exit visa to go to America. But he remembered well the lesson that my uncle and the Kay-Gee-Bee had once taught him. So, when he was filling out the forms, he did not mention the office where he had once worked with my uncle. Within a month, his application was approved. My uncle died half a year later, and never did get the chance to leave his motherland.:

We all reached for our wine glasses, and for several minutes, no one said a word.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apparently I'm not done with this after all.


End file.
